Understanding And Optimizing Your Search Bar

Summary

The search bar is a versatile tool for finding assets, collections, guides, chapters, and pages within your portal. Optimizing your search bar allows for maximum efficiency, and customized portal searches. Bynder's search option is boolean search by default, but you can request sticky search by contacting Customer Support.

This feature/solution is enable-able by any Bynder portal user.

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Search Bar Key Aspects

Using Search Tips and Shortcuts: To help you find assets more efficiently, the search bar includes built-in guidance and navigation tools. You can still access search tips by clicking the (?) Help icon located in the bottom-left corner of the search dropdown. This will provide a quick reference for using operators (like AND, OR, NOT) and wildcards to refine your results.

Natural Language Search: If enabled for your portal, you can toggle on Use natural language search at the top of the search dropdown. This allows you to find images by describing them (e.g., "a person sitting on a bench in a park") rather than relying solely on specific filenames or tags.

Types of Content: You can search for assets, collections, guides, chapters, and pages. 

Recent Searches: Clicking the search bar shows you a dropdown of your recent searches.

Highlighted Results: The system highlights descriptions, copyrights, and tags that match your query to help you understand why certain results are returned.

Smart Filters: Use smart filters in the filter bar to refine your search results by color, tags, and more. Add or remove filters easily to adjust results dynamically.

Note: Searching for assets on the homepage does not reset your smartfilters, but instead combines your search with the smartfilters that have been set.

Bynder Accepted Markup For The Search Bar

  • Exact Matches: Use quotation marks for exact match searches, e.g., "Boston skyline".
  • AND Operator: Use AND to include all terms that match the search, e.g., Boston AND skyline.
  • OR Operator: Use OR to include either search term, e.g., Boston OR skyline.
  • NOT Operator: Use AND NOT to exclude terms, e.g., Boston AND NOT skyline.
  • Search by Multiple Codes: Use the OR operator to search for multiple product codes, e.g., SK128945 OR DE438765.
  • Keywords with Separators: For exact matches with keywords containing separators, escape special characters, e.g., ("Bynder_1" OR "Bynder_2"). 

Note: Mid-word searches are not supported. For example, when searching for land, an asset only tagged with the title Finland won't be returned as a search result.

Understanding Boolean Vs. Sticky Search

  • Boolean Search: The search type allows you to apply multiple search filters with the AND, OR, and NOT operators.
  • Sticky Search: When enabled, the search query remains visible in the search bar, allowing quick modifications. 

Keyboard Shortcuts

Some keyboard shortcuts are available for the Bynder search bar. To close the search simply press the esc key. To navigate through the results use the up and down arrows. To go to the result you are over click the enter/return key. 

Confidence Score

Search results are ranked by relevance, with the highest scores given to matches in titles, tags, and metaproperty options and lower scores given to matches in filenames, descriptions, and document contents.

Separator Characters

Specific characters like "-", "_", spaces, and periods (".") function as separators, breaking up words into sections. Each section's first 20 characters are indexed on a character-by-character basis.

For example, if an asset's tag is animal, the values will be indexed as a & an & ani & anim & animal.

Maximum Search Characters

The suggested limit for search queries for both search types is 5,000 characters, including spaces (which is considered three characters). Exceeding this limit will result in errors.

Maximum Search Results

Only the first most relevant 10 items are returned from the search for each category.

Related Articles

How To Search By Image

Similarity Search for Image Assets

Natural Language Search (NLS)

Level: Beginner

Beginner-level articles are for everyone, these articles do not assume any prior Bynder knowledge. These articles are a great place to start your Bynder Journey.

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